Wax Japan
by Penelope-Z
Summary: Sirius and Remus -- Why wax is more precious than paper.


Warning: Slash, meaning male/male relationship. If it's not of your taste, please don't read any further.  
  
Disclaimer: If they were mine, I would have been rich. Want to see the state of my bank account?  
  
Wax Japan  
  
These are your cold-coffee days, dinner leftovers for morning breakfast, washing your face with the last sliver of soap, green mush glued to the side of sink, a dog sniffles in your garbage, the cracks on the wall are widening.  
  
The sun rears against window panes and the new day finds you alone in empty rooms. You yawn, you stretch, uncurling on the mattress and the motion sends the pile of paperbacks over the edge of the bedside table. Life in stasis, the old loves and old regrets stilled and neutralized now, everything is expendable, everything is expired, contained in greasy wrappings and empty pizza boxes. Junk food life, junk life.  
  
*  
  
When you were young, younger than today, you loved studying maps. At the Gryffindor dormitory, just before going to sleep, you used to spread them all over your bed and draw routes with the tip of your finger. Sky highways, joining imaginary dots over earth and sea. London to Sicily, Oslo to Kazakhstan, Hogwarts to the Pacific Islands and back again. A vagabond life in Sri Lanka with the demon hunter mafia. The annual veela dance west of Bucharest. Seven hundred fire tigresses sleeping under Krakatoa.  
  
"Doesn't Madagascar sound like a kind of ice-cream?" you asked Sirius one evening, as he fussed about the bed, lighting night candles. He stared at you, waved his wand and with the flick of the wrist a horrible wail of violins filled the air.  
  
"Shhh, you idiot, you'll wake up James and Peter! What's with all this cheesy crap?"  
  
"It's for the ambience," he said, and you rolled your eyes and made a face. There was a strange twist to his smile as he crawled towards you over the maps, paper continents crunching under his knees and pulled you down. He kissed you, his tongue warm and quick. In candlelight the darkness in the corners of the room had a rich, almost velvet quality. He said, "Don't go to Madagascar, don't go away, don't leave me behind."  
  
He said other things too, always good with big declarations, Sirius, and he probably expected the same in return, but words like those always scared you, the way they gained a life of their own when they left your mouth, the forever and always words.  
  
You fell asleep over crumbled oceans and coastlines, and the candle dripped wax all over your Japan.  
  
He said "don't go" but he was the one who left, and you the one left behind, confused, waiting, a small pebble of pain at the back of your throat, wondering whose turn it was to make a move, wondering about the appropriate behavior under such circumstances. Your replayed every action, every word, always that tendency to overanalyze, wanting to ask, "Wasn't I good enough?" and "Wasn't it good for you?" but not daring to. The questions were embarrassing, the waiting and wondering was embarrassing, like the heroine of some teen romance, writing letters she never sends, crying over a phone that doesn't ring, picking up the receiver just to hear the long-distance silences, the only thing her lover has to offer.  
  
Until they all left somehow, all of them, not just Sirius, and you watched in slow-motion desperation as they traveled ahead into their future, light- years of life between you.  
  
He came back one day. And he asked you: "Do you still keep your maps?" with a smile. But you knew better, you knew he watched you at night, and you never stirred, feigning sleep, your body sore from the stillness, you knew he was secretly angry at you. Angry for doubting his innocence, for not spending half a lifetime in a cell. You had betrayed him somehow, though he was the one who had left, and you the one waiting behind, never moving an inch. He was smiling when he asked, but he was jealous of your maps, your Japan and your Madagascar, so you just mumbled something incomprehensible in response.  
  
*  
  
Albus tries to be supportive, he talks of necessary grief and the unrealized potential in you, about butterfly cocoons and shedding your past self off your shoulders, like snakeskin and you say "I'm just a werewolf, Albus, not the entire animal kingdom," and he snorts.  
  
Everyone you meet is brimming with good intentions but they don't understand, it was a teenage hobby after all, those bloody maps, just a hobby, nothing more. It's only for the drops of wax that you still keep them, your folded-up continents. You pick them up and press them against your face for lack of anything else of his, not even an old shirt. Wax seems a much more precious material than paper, somehow, because you can change it and shape it, your unique candle countries molded by your own fingertips.  
  
Quiet now, in your cupped hands over the fireplace, the separate drops are melting in the heat, sizzling, and this wax world dissolves down to the heart of things, one land, Pangaea. 


End file.
